X-ray | Olympic Suffragette

Alice Milliat was the pioneer of the Women’s Games. One hundred years later, her dream of equality finally seems to be coming true… or not.

Why are we talking about it

The Paris Olympics, which began on Friday, boast of being the first gender-balanced Olympics in history. Indeed, there are as many women as men registered for the event this year. While this may seem obvious today, it is important to know that it was a long road to get there. And the first to dream of it was the Frenchwoman Alice Milliat, now considered the mother of the modern women’s Olympics.

A male event

When Baron Pierre de Coubertin relaunched the modern Olympics in 1896, there was no question of including women. For him, as for many people at the time, the female body should be used to give birth, not to show off on a racetrack! At the 1900 Games in Paris, there were only 20 women out of around 1,000 registered athletes. The sports practiced were limited to bourgeois disciplines such as horse riding, tennis, sailing, croquet, golf, etc. and were mainly demonstration sports. There would be very little progress in this area until the 1920s.

Alice arrives…

This is where Alice Milliat, a woman from Nantes with a strong character, arrives. A widow with no children, this former rower returns from London, where the feminist movement and the suffragette fight are bubbling. She gets involved in the administration of women’s sports clubs in France, to the point of setting up the very first International Women’s Sports Federation (FSFI). Unable to impose women’s athletics at the “official” Olympic Games of Baron de Coubertin, she organizes in 1922 the first Women’s Games in modern history, in Paris, inspired by the Héréan Games of Antiquity. “The idea for her was to show, through this event, that women were capable, that they were athletes, that they were not joking around in a stadium”, summarizes the journalist Sophie Danger, author of the recent book Alice Milliat, the Olympic womanThis first all-female event features 77 athletes from Great Britain, Switzerland, Italy, Norway and France.

Sexism, when you hold us

This success did not please the very masculine members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), who forbade Alice Milliat from using the term “Olympic”. For the next three editions, the competition was therefore renamed the Women’s World Games. It was not until 1928 in Amsterdam (and the retirement of the baron) that women were finally able to compete in athletics at the “official” Olympics, a first step towards equality. But this victory was bittersweet for Alice Milliat, since they were only allowed in five disciplines (100 meters, 4 x 100 meters, 800 meters, high jump and discus throw). In addition, sexism was never far away. At the end of a fiercely contested 800 meters, the runners collapsed on the grass. This “collapse” was recounted with condescension in the media. For the IOC, it was proof that the “weaker sex” cannot aspire to equality in sport! “This event for women would not be reinstated until 1960,” laments Sophie Danger. “We had to fight for 32 years to get people to accept that women could run two laps of the track…”

Better and better

In the years that followed, Alice Milliat would “battle a lot with the IOC,” notes Sophie Danger. But her vision would eventually prevail. With the evolution of mentalities and the trivialization of women’s sport, resistance gradually fell. Although the IOC remained fundamentally masculine, the feminization of the Olympic Games continued. There were 13% women in Tokyo in 1964, 20% in Montreal in 1976, 23% in Los Angeles in 1984, 44% in London in 2012 (the first year where women were finally entitled to a complete athletic program)… Since 1991, any new discipline at the Olympic Games must include women’s events. In Paris in 2024, parity was finally achieved with 5,250 athletes among men and as many among women. But this marketing ploy must be put into perspective, suggests Sophie Danger. Some disciplines are in fact reserved for women (rhythmic gymnastics), while others have been reduced in distance to allow parity (50 km walk reduced to 20 km for men). “We must not confuse equality and parity,” denounces the journalist. Parity is only numerical equality.”

Forgotten, resurrected

After her retirement from the world of sport, Alice Milliat completely disappeared from the map and died in 1957 in complete anonymity. “No one talked about her anymore and she didn’t want anyone to talk about her anymore… She left her legacy more than her person,” emphasizes Sophie Danger. The result of a renewed reading of History, her importance is now being reconsidered. Gradually rehabilitated, Alice Milliat is now recognized as an activist and a founder. In 2021, a statue was finally erected in her honor in Paris, while an esplanade bears her name on the site of the Paris Olympics. “This little wink from History is quite funny,” concludes M^me Danger. A hundred years after the Paris Games, where Coubertin didn’t want her, people are starting to talk a lot about her. She is one of those great pioneers. Personally, I have never heard of women who have done so much in the field of sport.